


Asymptotic Behavior

by rageprufrock



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-09
Updated: 2010-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-06 01:12:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don knows this math.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asymptotic Behavior

"Okay, it would help if you pressed the accelerator."

"I am pressing the accelerator."

"Okay, I meant press the accelerator more."

Charlie's nostril's flare and his eyes go wide in a familiar expression of unmitigated horror, much the same way they did when Don had tried to teach him how to hit a baseball instead of calculating it's arc, slope, velocity, and inclination.

"A little more?" Don compromises.

Charlie's mouth opens and math spews out, which Don has learned over the course of going on seventeen years to ignore. When Charlie finishes in a feverish babble--something about "impact ratios and twisted metal"--Don smiles patiently at him and says, "Charlie, press down on the God damn gas."

Charlie looks betrayed and horrified and a little bit like he's going to cry, but he does it, and the car slides a few meager feet forward in the deserted parking lot before it jerks to a halt. Don winces, but thinks that his breaks a worthy sacrifice.

He's been having nightmares about being on the road and getting phone calls from his baby brother, saying, "I'm at a hotel in Los Alamos, I don't have money for cab fare--can you come pick me up?" Don will say, "I'm in Washington," and then Charlie's naked, singed body will

be found on the side of the road three weeks later, his parents throwing Don watery, heartbroken and accusatory glances.

It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, the one time Don couldn't come pick Charlie up from his tutor Charlie was discovered locked in a public library four hours after they closed

when he finally pulled his head out of a book to call somebody on a pay phone. Don nearly killed him with his bare hands but then his dad said, "Get in line, son."

"I don't think this is a good idea," Charlie starts in again. "I mean, if you look at the statistics on automobile accidents, you find that they're increasing annually. Factoring in the rising number of cars on an increasingly taxed road system which isn't necessarily designed to handle the environmental stresses currently put upon it and you're looking at a potential disaster of cataclysmic proportions," he argues, not taking a breath between his complete sentences.

Don's always wondered if all that research about oxygen feeding the brain had any real validity, given his brother's remarkable ability to subsist without it for vast periods of time while he was ranting about one mathematical concept that nobody understood or another. Don passes the remaining time Charlie wails and whines about what amounts to, when distilled from the elegant statistical terms in which Charlie is couching his fears, dying in a horrible, terrible, very bad wreck.

When Charlie shows signs of flagging, Don interrupts, saying, "Did you feel how the car moved? That was really good. Try that again, okay? We're just going in a straight line."

"Are you not listening to anything I'm saying?" Charlie demands, a little hysterically.

"Okay, press down on the accelerator," Don repeats, and Charlie groans.

*

Charlie's seventeen years old, almost eighteen, which is old enough to know how to drive a car.

It's also old enough that he shouldn't spend all of his big brother's two months vacation clinging onto said big brother, but Don doesn't mind that last one quite so much as the first. Don's been in an out of relationships and he's currently out, and Charlie likes watching Don play baseball, which Don is happy to do.

So when Don came home from school for the last time he spent the first night with his whole family eating a huge and ridiculous dinner and then the second day tricking Charlie into going to the DMV, which was easier than it should have been, given his brother was in the middle of doing his graduate work at CalSci.

"Hey, want to go to the batting cages?" Don had asked.

"Hey, yeah! I think I discovered a new formula that would really improve--"

"That's great, I just need to stop at the DMV for a second to get some paperwork done," Don had agreed enthusiastically, gathered up Charlie's birth certificate, his high school diploma, and practically stuffed his brother into the car.

On the one hand, he should have felt bad about taking advantage of Charlie's (apparently) blind trust in him, on the other, Don's going away to play minor league ball soon and nobody's going to chauffer Charlie around anymore. Plus, Don would rather not see his brother's gruesome bicycle and highway related death splashed all over the "Odds and Ends" section of the local paper.

"What are the chances, you think, of being able to take the written driver's test and you passing on the first shot?" Don had asked, wide-eyed and innocent.

"Actually, I've been thinking about that. I got really bored one day and I was digging around in your desk--"

Don had forced himself not to automatically cuff Charlie at that.

"--and found this old copy of the driver's manual, which I'm sure is out of date but..."

By the time they're at the DMV, through the line, and at the point where Charlie is about to take the eye exam, his brother finally figures out that there's something seriously wrong here. Don just claps him on the shoulder in manly, comforting way, and says, "Do it for Dad. You can't keep taking complete and total advantage of him."

Charlie sulks but he goes through with it and passes the driver's test on the first shot. His photograph makes him look like a drugged rentboy, but Don demurs from saying it (too much) and Charlie stares at it in gruesome fascination all the way home.

*

Three hours later, morning traffic is coagulating on the streets outside and they're sitting in an IHOP, Charlie's hands are still shaking from the adrenaline rush of operating heavy machinery. Don is rolling his eyes and on his third coffee refill, picking at the last of the breakfast on his plate.

Charlie's hair is in his face as he talks excitedly, scribbling on a napkin about how fast he drove and how far (the width of one parking lot) and the mathematical intricacies therein. Don thinks that Charlie needs to get a haircut, his wild, dark curls are going everywhere. Don had hair like that when he'd been younger, but he'd sheared it all off in middle school, and his mother had never quite recovered from the heartbreak; Don suspects it was overcompensation that kept Charlie's hair a coffee-colored bird's nest, bouncing across Charlie's forehead.

Charlie was always easily excitable, the child they had to mind first and foremost wherever they went, because Charlie got bored, Charlie got scared, Charlie, even though he had an adult's genius, had a child's attention span.

Don never got around to resenting Charlie for it, though, because Don's childhood interests seemed to be working in his brother's favor, and he and Charlie developed a language all their own around the baseball diamond, around box scores, around batting averages and Don's Little League games and varsity team membership. Charlie had been the unofficial batboy for Don's high school team, faithfully present at every single one of Don's games, excited and starry-eyed, practically glowing every time Don dropped a word of praise his way--it was impossible to stay mad at his little brother, they seemed like such different people.

So in high school, when people heard about Don the baseball star and Charlie the jumped-up math geek, there seemed to be only a peripheral awareness that they were related. Over the years, Don thinks that maybe he has started to feel this way, too, that he and Charlie are part of a very strange accident, polarities reversed with flaws.

Don doesn't hate Charlie for getting all the attention and fame and prestige, in many ways, it's like knowing you're related to Faulkner--interesting information but ultimately not part of your life.

And Don's life has narrowed to the Stockton Rangers and how he's thrilled and scared at the same time, though he'd never show it. Instead, Don keeps himself up at night thinking about what it'll be like to bat in a stadium of people, where the energy pulses and the lights are blinding and he can feel the sweat on his palms. Don likes to imagine the grain of the wooden bat, the "thock" of it striking against the ball, and in a momentary moment of mathematical coherence, he sees in his mind's eye the perfect, beautiful arc of the baseball against the blue, blue sky.

*

Don makes Charlie drive everywhere that summer.

To In and Out for burgers, to the movies, to the grocery store. Anything that Charlie wants to do he has to get there himself, and Charlie gets used to it after a while and stops citing all the different and interesting ways they could die on the ten, used to Don in the passenger seat, to the way that Don will sometimes reach over to the steering wheel in a particularly tense, LA moment and put his hand over Charlie's to guide the car.

*

Normalcy isn't a part of Don's history he remembers with any real clarity. The time before Charlie was three and Don was eight is hazy at best, punctuated by moments of sunny, childish bliss he half-thinks is of his own fabrication. Either way, Charlie changed everything, still does, runs the world in circles with his numbers, and Don knows that sometimes Charlie gets so lost in the caverns of his own mind that he will look up and be terrified of the dark he hadn't even noticed.

So Don's always led him out, said, "Hey, buddy," and let Charlie fake him out at basketball or watch a movie together or go to the batting cages--figure out Don's batting average, his stats based just on the way he steps up to the plate.

But Don doesn't have summers and falls and holidays for Charlie anymore, and won't for a long time, whether or not he's picked up in the major league draft. He's twenty-one now and sort of an adult, and the thought's jarring, because his brother's still a baby in all the ways that matter.

So Don got Charlie into the front seat and his foot down on the accelerator--now all Charlie has to do is move.

*

Don gets up to leave at five AM on a Thursday morning to avoid a big emotional scene. It totally backfires on him because his parents are awake and thrilled for him and make him a giant breakfast and hug and kiss him senseless. Charlie sits in the corner and looks all bruised up inside, which makes Don want to punch himself in the face, but there's not much he can do about it. He broke Charlie's inertia, but they were never supposed to be traveling in the same direction.

"You going to be okay?" Don asks over eggs, eyeing his brother carefully.

Charlie stares at his untouched plate. "I'm fine. I'm working on a weak force theory. Sort of."

Don raises an eyebrow. He actually knows what that is. "Hey, I know you'll crack it," he says reassuringly, and when Charlie lifts his head to look at him hopefully, Don smiles and says, "You can crack anything."

"Never figured you out," Charlie protests feebly, and Don only grins.

"I'm your brother, not a math problem, buddy."

"Sometimes, you're just as interesting," Charlie mutters, and asks, "Are you coming back for Hanukkah?"

"No, Charlie, I thought I'd just let you and Mom and Dad disown me," Don says lightly, and looks at his watch, says to his parents:

"Hey, I've got to head out."

His parents frown at Charlie for the obvious acting out, but Don says, "Hey, it's cool, don't worry about it," when Charlie doesn't give Don a going-away hug or even best wishes. Don is a good big brother (most of the time--when he's not thirteen, at least) so he waves from the window of his car and starts to drive away, his whole life packed into trunks in the back of his car.

*

Don is coasting down a desert highway when he reaches into his glove compartment to fumble for his sunglasses.

When Charlie's permit falls out instead, Don stares at it so long he nearly drives off the road, and later, in his dingy motel room in the dingy town terrified out of his mind at the thought of his first practice with the Rangers the next day, Don plays with the plastic card in his hand, grins.

Charlie is the unmovable object and Don is the irresistible force, but like Don's always known, they are forces applied in subtly different ways. So even if Don got a C in Physics and a D in Calculus, he knows that he and Charlie are asymptotic, similar creatures--infinitely close and never reaching.


End file.
